Just another polar bear adrift in the sea

As it turns out… social media. At least that is the feeling I have been getting recently. Facebook, which seems to have seeped into every corner of our lives is slowly taking the social out of it and just leaving us with media. When was the last time someone on your feed said something meaningful? When was the last time you had a soul nourishing exchange on messenger or Reddit?

Recently I took a vacation of sorts from social media and as a by-product, being social. Turned out, if I didn’t reach out to people, almost none reached out to me. That isn’t a complaint mind you, just an observation. Over and over I hear about people feeling disconnected from one another and it makes me wonder if they are reaching out in a way that fills their soul or are they just reposting memes wondering where the ability to make friends has gone in their life. I’m not sure. To that end I have decided to bare my soul a little in an effort to contribute more than just “hey I like cats” to my feed.

So here are some things you may not know about me (this is a TMI WARNING!!!) Seriously, if you don’t want to know skip all this and wait for my next post cuz momma bear is going to rant a little.

I am Pagan. The Goddess and I have a thing going on and it’s beautiful. My path right now means more to me than so many other things in my life. It is taking up a lot of my free processing space which means I am not reaching out to people like I once was. Please understand and accept my apologies.

Pinky and I are polyamorous. This means we date/see other people with full knowledge. This does not mean we will just date anyone who comes nor does it mean I will date you just because. Stop asking. Seriously.

I have been the victim of abuse. My brother sexually abused me when I was a pre-teen, my grandmother was a shit show of a woman and I lived with her and as most women I have been the victim of sexual assault more than once. Some overt, men touching me unasked or commenting on my “fuckability” (my favorite was “do you spit or do you swallow ” my first day at my first job) and some not so much. Some not so much, constantly telling me how much they want to get in my pants or taking me to their favorite spot which happened to be a place I could not easily leave and getting sexual (on a first date no less) It doesn’t define who I am but it affects how I react to some things. Ok, that isn’t true. I am everything my grandmother wasn’t because she was so horribly abusive. Luckily for me she was also a bigot, racist and authoritarian.

I am kinky but that doesn’t mean I am going to be with you. Get over it.

As a child I had no friends until the 6th grade. Not.an.exaggeration. Because of the aforementioned abuse it was hard for me to reach out to people. Believe it or not I was an introverted kid. My friends, therefore, mean so very much to me. Always have. It takes a lot to get me to walk way from someone once my heart has committed to them so rest assured if I walked away it was because there were many, many blows to the friendship before the final one. It also means when I noticed people I love didn’t reach out to me as I went silent it fucked me up way more than I will ever admit to anyone in person. There were also people who did reach out and those people, honestly, saved a little bit of my sanity.

I honestly believe that love is more important than hate. That all human beings deserve to be treated as human beings and not as other or objects of hate. You cannot say you support human rights then talk shit about people you don’t know. That’s right.. I am looking at you. You support women’s rights but not trans women or conservative women. You believe in freedom of speech but not taking a knee. You cannot bring people up if you then turn around and bring someone down.
You cannot empower people if you turn around and criticize someone’s looks, religion (and yes… even Christians) or their choice in partners.

Now.. if you have made it to the end of this and are still reading. I’m taking some “me” time to work on a few things but will happily find time to talk to you either in person or *gasp* on the phone. Just bump me on messenger and let me know. This may come as a surprise to you but I miss your face and would love seeing you. Let me know if you want to see me. (for those at long distance, let’s work something out)
You are awesome and I love you.

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Everyone has a moment when they realize they are not as enlightened as they thought. This week has shown me that I might have a lot more inner work to do. Let me explain *groovy way back music starts…*

I have always been a big fan of curvy girls. I am a curvy girl. At various points in my life I have been the Pacific Coast Highway all the way up to Lombard St. level of curviness. I have strived to accept, nay! love my curves. It’s not easy with the constant barrage of media/husbands/general pubic all trying to convince you that the body you love is unacceptable by modern standards. However for the last year I thought I had it pretty well in hand, this self acceptance I try so hard to urge others to embrace. Until this week.

Let’s start with Sunday, after an afternoon of puttering around the house (and a little accidental napping) which left me beat and a little out of breath I decided that I had Had It with my body. I was tired of being fat and out of shape. Once again I would try a Plan to get my sorry ass in shape. First things first- throw away the scale. The numbers on it kept getting higher and higher and my love of my body kept getting lower and lower. I was falling back into the weight = worth trap.

Monday morning after Pinky left for work my first thought was to hit the scale. Once I realized we threw it away the day before (pre-coffee Sylvari is full of slow. What can I say?) I started planning to take it out of the trash, weigh myself, then put it away again. Almost immediately on the tail of that thought was the realization that was exactly the behavior I had when I quit smoking the first time. Was I really addicted to the weigh in? The number? Was I really that lost without it? Yep. So much for body acceptance. I couldn’t even make it through a day without looking to that number for validation. Time to fix that I thought.

Mid week my doctor called back to let me in on the results of my blood work. She told me that I have a bit of an iron issue as well as Vitamin D and put me on a couple of meds , a diet change and a warning that if my levels don’t rise in four months I would have to get a transfusion to get back to where I should be. Yes, that is as scary to me as you think it is. The up side is it explains the serious fatigue, the shortness of breath and the muscle fatigue that I have been attributing to all of a sudden being completely out of shape. That is how insidious the weight/body message has been. A sudden onset of those symptoms and instead of thinking that there was something wrong with me I defaulted to “of course. You are fat. What did you expect” Gods knows what kind of damage I could have done if I had just continued to suck it up and tried to exercise my way to health.

This is how fat shaming hurts people. When you look at people and reduce them to one thing- their weight, then everything else about them suffers. I bought into the bullshit without knowing I had and it almost cost me big time.

So today I was feeling pretty good about these revelations, trucking along at work when all the good work I had done came crashing down around my ears.

In a discussion with two of the ladies “helping” with the tag sale we will have tomorrow we were discussing my vitamin D dose because one of the ladies also takes the same med. I mentioned how relieved I was to know that my fatigue etc had a cause that wasn’t “Sylvari is a fat girl” and the other lady (We will call her Little Miss Type A) looked at me and said “well there can be many causes for those things” I got the hint. She might as well have said “don’t be stupid, you are fat and that is your problem” One sentence and I was hearing all those voices in my head telling me all those ugly things I had been working so hard to overcome. LMTA is, of course, thin. She also runs the Fitness Center on site so not surprising she thnks I am a fat ass but to hear it was still super hurtful. All day I stewed about it. by stewed I mean beat myself up over and over. Until I realized that I had fallen into the trap once more. I let her define my self worth by her narrow, uneducated standards.

I like curvy girls, I am a HUGE fan. Starting today that includes me. 🙂

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Virgin post! It’s a lovely, gray, chilly late November early October day. There is pasta baking in the oven and football for later today. These are the types of days that make me love living in New England.

I am not sure what I am going to use this blog for yet but for now it’s enough to say Hi! I am Sylvari. Welcome.